Fall Arts Preview

RALPH NELSON / WARNER BROS. George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt in a scene from the film “Ocean’s 12

True Stories
CRITIC'S CHOICE
EXPLORATIONS OF THE LIVES OF MEN

Entrapped in his obsessions and compulsions, he eventually became the perfect American weirdo — all silences and unclipped toenails. But before that, Howard Hughes, at least as Martin Scorsese sees him, was the perfect American, period. He was rich. He was romantic. He was fearless. And as an inventor and entrepreneur, he was one of the past century's great visionaries. It is this Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who dominates The Aviator — recklessly crashing planes and cars, heedlessly wooing Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), among others.

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"[The film] has a lot to do with the nature of wanting to be famous," says Scorsese, "the nature of wanting to be a star." Beyond that, though, he sees his flyer in classic terms: as Croesus or Midas, with a golden curse, or as Icarus, flying too close to the sun on waxy wings. Above all, The Aviator, expensively set in the America of the 1920s, '30s and '40s, promises to be as grandly aspiring as its subject, and this being a Martin Scorsese film, full of grim foreshadowings as well. "The seeds of his own destruction are right inside of him," the director muses, happy to have once again embraced romanticism's darker side.

One way or another, all biopics improve on reality, lending life a coherence and meaning that eludes us as we live it. Since our reality is at present so incomprehensible, maybe we need that kind of narrative logic now. That, anyway, is how Hollywood is betting this fall. From Ray (Charles, that is) to Che (Guevara), we are going to see a lot of real people — all male, natch — battling their way to triumph or martyrdom. Jamie Foxx is perfectly cast as the singer overcoming blindness and addiction on his way to becoming an icon. Colin Farrell too seems freakishly right — with the possible exception of the hair — as the charismatic, ambitious Alexander the Great in Oliver Stone's Alexander. The Motorcycle Diaries features Gael Garcia Bernal as a carefree Guevara vrooming around South America on his hog, looking for fun but discovering the beginnings of his revolutionary destiny. Too political? Try Finding Neverland — Johnny Depp doing a loose interpretation of J.M. Barrie, exploring both the realities and the fantasies that conditioned his creation of Peter Pan. Too twee? How about Liam Neeson in Kinsey as the curiously haunted sexologist who got us talking about our sexual lives and longings? There's a life story for every taste. --By Richard Schickel

Shakespeare: the Man Behind the Scenes
Is it because so little is known about Shakespeare's life that so much has been written about it? Shakespeare left behind no diaries or letters. His name appears in some parish records and legal papers and in the commentaries of a few contemporaries. The rest is silence. Or is it? By listening closely to the poems and plays, and by assembling scraps of historical evidence into (mostly) plausible surmises, scholar Stephen Greenblatt has produced Will in the World (Norton; 406 pages), a dazzling and subtle biography, due Sept. 20, that teases out possibilities in the bard's inner and outer life, like the much argued conjecture that in youth, Shakespeare was secretly Catholic in an England where the old faith was being suppressed. You may not always be persuaded by Greenblatt's intuitive leaps, but you'll have great fun watching him jump. --By Richard Lacayo

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2. McCain's Prickly TIME Interview
3. The Palin Pick: Bold or Disastrous?
4. McCain's Surprise Pick: Sarah Palin
5. Klein: Obama's Speech 'Very Tough'
6. Obama's Risky Stadium Gig
7. Exclusive Poll: Obama's Swing Leads
8. Is McCain Overplaying the POW Card?
9. What Bush Taught McCain
10. Clinton Builds a Bridge to Obama